The Quakers appeared about a hundred years after the decentralization of authority in theological science. The Reformers’ dream of a remade church had ended in a Europe where, over against an alienated parent, four young Protestant communions disputed together as to the doctrinal interpretation of the scriptures. Within these communions the goal towards which the breaking away from the Roman centre had been an unconscious step was already well in view. It was obvious that the separated churches were helpless against the demands arising in their midst for the right of individual interpretation where they themselves drew such widely differing conclusions. The Bible, abroad amongst the people for the first time, helped on the loosening of the hold of stereotyped beliefs. Independent groups appeared in every direction.
In England, the first movement towards the goal of “religious liberty” was made by a body of believers who declared that a national church was against the will of God. Catholic in ideal, democratic in form, they set their hope upon a world-wide Christendom of self-governing congregations. They increased with great rapidity, suffered persecution, martyrdom, and temporary dispersal.[1]
Following on this first challenge came the earliest stirring of a more conservative catholicism. Fed by such minds as that of Nicholas Farrer, grieving in scholarly seclusion over the ravages of the Protestantisms, it found expression in Laud’s effort to restore the broken continuity of tradition in the English church, to reintroduce beauty into her services, and, while preserving her identity as a developing national body, to keep open a rearward window to the light of accumulated experience and teaching. But hardly-won freedom saw popery in his every act, and his final absolutism, his demand for executive power independent of Parliament, wrecked the effort and cost him his life.
These characteristic neo-Protestantisms were obscured at the moment of the appearance of the Quakers by the opening in this country of the full blossom of the Genevan theology. The fate of the Presbyterian system, which covered England like a network, and had threatened during the shifting policies of Charles’s long struggle for absolute monarchy to become the established church of England, was sealed, it is true, when Cromwell’s Independent army checked the proceedings of a Presbyterian House of Commons; but the Calvinian reading of the scriptures had prevailed over the popular imagination, and in the Protectorate Church where Baptists, Independents, and Presbyterians held livings side by side with the clergy of the Protestant Establishment, where the use of the Prayer-Book was forbidden and the scriptures were at last supreme, the predominant type of religious culture was what we have since learned to call Puritanism. In 1648 Puritanism had reached its great moment. Its poet[2] was growing to manhood, tortured by the uncertainty of election, half-maddened by his vision of the doom hanging over a sin-stained world.
But far away beneath the institutional confusions and doctrinal dilemmas of this post-Reformation century fresh life was welling up. The unsatisfied religious energy of the maturing Germanic peoples, groping its own way home, had produced Boehme and his followers, and filled the by-ways of Europe with mystical sects. Outwards from free Holland—whose republic on a basis of religious toleration had been founded in 1579—spread the Anabaptists, Mennonites, and others. Coming to England, they reinforced the native groups—the Baptists, Familists, and Seekers—who were preaching personal religion up and down the country under the protection of Cromwell’s indulgence for “tender” consciences, and found their characteristically English epitome and spokesman in George Fox.
Born in an English village[3] of homely pious parents,[4] who were both in sympathy with their thoughtful boy, his genius developed harmoniously and early.
Until his twentieth year he worked with a shoemaker, who was also a dealer in cattle and wool, and proved his capacity for business life. Then a crisis came, brought about by an incident meeting him as he went about his master’s affairs. He had been sent on business to a fair, and had come upon two friends, one of them a relative, who tried to draw him into a bout of health-drinking. George, who had had his one glass, laid down a groat and went home in a state of great disturbance, for he knew both these men to be professors of religion. He grappled with the difficulty at once. He spent the hours of that night in pacing up and down his room, in prayer and crying out, in sitting still and reflecting. In the light of the afternoon’s incidents he saw and felt for the first time the average daily life of the world about him, “how young people go together into vanity, and old people into the earth,” all that gave meaning to life for him had no existence in their lives, even in the lives of professing Christians. He was thrown in on himself. If God was not with those who professed him, where was He?
The labours and gropings of the night simplified before the dawn came to the single conviction that he must “forsake all, both young and old, and keep out of all, and be a stranger unto all.” There was no hesitating. He went forth at once and wandered for four years up and down the Midland counties seeking for light, for truth, for firm ground in the quicksands of disintegrating faiths, for a common principle where men seemed to pull every way at once. He sought all the “professors” of every shade and listened to all, but would associate with none, shunning those who sought him out: “I was afraid of them, for I was sensible they did not possess what they professed.” He went to hear the great preachers of the day in London and elsewhere, but found no light in them. Now and again amongst obscure groups to which hope drew him one and another were struck by his sayings, and responded to him, but he shrank from their approval. The clergy of different denominations in the neighbourhood of his home, where he returned for a while in response to the disquietude of his parents, could not understand his difficulties. How should they? He was perfectly sound in every detail of the Calvinian doctrine. They could make nothing of a distress so unlike that of other pious young Puritans. Orthodox as he was, there is no sign in his outpourings of any concern for his soul, not a word of fear, nor any sense of sin, though he heartily acknowledges temptations, a divided nature, “two thirsts.” He begs the priests to tell him the meaning of his troubled state—not as one doubting, but rather with the restiveness of one under a bondage, keeping him from that which he knows to be accessible.
One minister advised tobacco and psalm-singing, another physic and bleeding. His family urged him to marry.
His distress grew, amounting sometimes to acute agony of mind: “As I cannot declare the great misery I was in, it was so great and heavy upon me, so neither can I set forth the mercies of God unto me in all my misery.” Brief intermissions there were when he was “brought into such a joy that I thought I had been in Abraham’s bosom.”
But on the whole his wretchedness steadily increased. None could help. The written word had ceased to comfort him. He wandered days and nights in solitary places taking no food.
Illumination came at last—a series of convictions dawning in the mind that truth cannot be found in outward things, and, finally, the moment of release—the sense of which he tries to convey to us under the symbolism of a voice making his heart leap for joy—leaving him remade in a new world.
Two striking passages from his Journal may serve to illustrate this period of his experience: “The Lord did gently lead me along, and did let me see His love, which was endless and eternal, and surpasseth all the knowledge that men have in the natural state, or can get by history or books ... and I was afraid of all company, for I saw them perfectly where they were, through the love of God which let me see myself”; and, again, as he struggles to express the change that had taken place for him: “Now I was come up in spirit through the flaming sword into the paradise of God. All things were new; and all the creation gave another smell unto me than before beyond what words can utter.”
Two years of intense life followed. He came back to the world with his message for all men, all churches, with no new creed to preach, but to call all men to see their creeds in the light of the living experience which had first produced them, to live themselves in that light shining pure and original within each one of them, the light which wrote the scriptures and founded the churches; to refuse to be put off any longer with “notions,” mere doctrines, derivative testimonies obscuring the immediate communication of life to the man himself.
This message—the message of the inner light of immediate inspiration, of the existence in every man of some measure of the Spirit of God—the Quakers laid, as it were, side by side with the doctrines of the Puritanism amidst which they were born. They did not escape the absolute dualism of the thought of their day. They believed man to be shut up in sin, altogether evil, and they declared at the same time that there is in every man that which will, if he yields to its guidance, lift him above sin, is able to make him here and now free and sinless. The essential irreconcilability of the two positions does not appear to have troubled them.
This belief in the divine light within the individual soul was, of course, nothing new. The Roman Church had taught it. Instruction as to the conditions whereby it may have its way with a man was the end of her less worldly labours.
The Protestants taught it; the acceptance of salvation, the birth of the light in the darkness of the individual soul was the message of the Book. But George Fox and his followers claimed that the measure of divine life, nesting, as it were, within the life of each man, was universal, was before churches and scriptures, and had always led mankind. Yet it was not to be confused with the natural light of reason of the Socinians and Deists, for the first step towards union with it was a control of all creaturely activities, a total abandonment of each and every claim of the surface intelligence—“notions,” as the Quakers called them—a process of retirement into the innermost region of being, into “the light,” “the seed,” “the ground of the soul,” “that which hath convinced you.”
The God of the Quakers, then, was no literary obsession coming to meet them along the pages of history; no traditional immensity visiting man once, and silent ever since, to be momentarily invoked from infinite spatial distance by external means of grace; no “notion,” no mere metaphysical absolute, but a living process, a changing, changeless absolute, a breath controlling all things, an amazing birth within the soul. Tradition they valued as a record of God’s dealings with man. The Bible held for them no enfeebling spell. Their controversial writings have, indeed, anticipated, as has recently been pointed out,[5] the methods of the higher criticism; they touch on the synoptic problems; they ask their biblicist opponents whether they are talking of original autographs, transcribed copies, or translations. They rally them: “Who was it that said to the Spirit of God, O Spirit, blow no more, inspire no more men, make no more prophets from Ezra’s days downward till Christ, and from John’s days downward for ever? But cease, be silent, and subject thyself, as well as all evil spirits, to be tried by the standard that’s made up of some of the writings of some of those men thou hast moved to write already; and let such and such of them as are bound up in the bibles now used in England be the only means of measuring all truth for ever.”
The Incarnation was to them the one instance of a perfect shining of the light, a perfect realization of the fusion of human and divine, the full indwelling of the Godhead, which was their goal. The incidents of that life shone clear to them in the light of what went forward in themselves in proportion as they struggled to live in the spirit.
But neither was this claim, the assertion of an immediate pathway to reality within the man himself, anything new in the world. Each nation, each great period of civilization, has produced individuals, or groups separated by time and creed, but unanimous in their testimony as to its existence.
The giants among them stand upon the highest peaks of human civilization. Their art or method in debased or arrested forms is to be found in every valley. They have been called “mystics,” and it is to the classical century of European mysticism, to the group (of which Tauler was the mainstay) calling themselves the “Friends of God,” that we must go for an outbreak of mystical genius akin to that which took place in seventeenth-century England. Both groups made war on the official Christianity of their day, and strove to relate Christendom afresh to its true source of vitality, to re-form the church on a spiritual basis. The testimony, the end, and the means for the attainment of the end were the same in both. The immense distinction between them arose from the difference in the conditions under which the two ventures were made. The fourteenth-century mystics opened their eyes in a congenial environment, in a church whose symbolism, teaching, and ordinances, were a coherent reflection of their own experiences, stood justified by their personal knowledge of the “law” of spiritual development, the conditions of advance in the way on which their feet were set.
They owed much to tradition, to their theological studies, to their familiarity with the recorded experiences of holy men; they recognized their church as the transmitter of this tradition, as the guardian of saintly testimony on the subject of their art. They recognized her, not as an end but as a means, not as a prison, but as a home for all the human family, keeping open her doors, on the one hand, to the unconverted, providing, on the other, a suitable medium, the right atmosphere and opportunities, whereby pilgrims in the spiritual life might develop, to their full, possibilities in advance of the common measure of the group. They chid her, they exposed abuses, and called for reforms; they challenged the “carnal conception” of the sacraments, and denounced the loose lives of her dignitaries; but they remained in the church.
The Quakers, on the contrary, appeared when few of those who were in authority were able to understand what had arisen in their midst. Fox brought his challenge by the wayside; untrammelled by tradition, fearless in inexperience, he endowed all men with his own genius, and called upon the whole world to join him in the venture of faith.